Physiologist Jared Berg talks with us about how he uses both in-lab and on-the-road testing to determine what type of work an athlete should focus on.
Episode Transcript
Trevor Connor 00:05
hello and welcome to fast talk. Your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host. Trevor Connor, there’s a question we keep coming back to on the show, and it’s not because we’ve run out of things to talk about. It’s because this is a question that is nuanced, that has many different answers. Is one of the most important questions that every athlete asks, How do I determine what work I should be doing and will get the most value out of we’ve had every answer from just do what’s fun to do work that mimics your race to a deep dive into what coaches often call energy systems and how to target them. But there is one way of getting to an answer for this question that we haven’t given enough time and attention to, and it is in many ways the most valuable answer, using in lab and on the road testing to get a profile the athlete and figure out from that profile where they can see the most gains. Fast talk labs physiologist Jared Berg has been testing athletes for over 20 years, and after every test, he pulls them into a room, spends a lot of time going through a host of numbers and graphs that show who this athlete is as a cyclist or runner, Jared has become the master of noticing an oddity in a particular number or a certain shape in a lactic graph to tell the athlete here’s an area of opportunity for you and here’s how to train it. We frequently talk about what the science shows, including a recent episode where we talked about whether there’s any evidence for zone two training. But Jared, in many ways, have something even more powerful to answer those questions 1000s of before and after test results to show exactly how particular workouts and forms of training have affected an athlete’s profile. So today, Jared shares some of his secrets and tells us what he looks for in test results to determine if an athlete should be focused on base, endurance, threshold, work, anaerobic capacity, intervals, Cadence, work, or something else, nothing beats in lab testing. But throughout Jared, will talk about what you can do on the road to get answers for yourself of what sort of work you should be doing. Joining Jared, we’ll hear from Dr Marco altini, a key advisor to oura rings, and friend of the show, Dr Steven Seiler, so get ready to find your area of opportunity, and let’s make you fast. Jared, welcome back. We haven’t had you on the show in a little bit. It’s been a bit.
Jared Berg 02:12
Thanks for having me excited.
Trevor Connor 02:13
I feel kind of bad because your physiology studio is in view of where we’re sitting right now. So at any point, we could have been like, Hey, Jared, come over.
Jared Berg 02:22
We’re both having fun in our separate spaces. Though it’s good stuff. I like it. We can collaborate.
Trevor Connor 02:27
Yeah, no, this is gonna be fun. So this is not a new theme for the show, but we’re gonna approach it from a little bit of a different perspective. So we’re going back to talking about intervals and how to pick the interval work we’re doing. And most recently, we had this conversation in Episode 362, and for anybody who’s been listening to all these episodes, you’ve been getting a lot of different biases. We’ve gone all the way to the one extreme of just saying, You know what? All interval work does the same thing? Go do sprints, go to tabatas, go do thresholds. Who cares? Whatever motivates you, because they all produce the same gains. To know it is highly specific. And if you’re doing 15, fifteens versus 3030s, versus 2010s, versus two minutes on two minutes off, all them are producing different gains and have different benefits. We’ve seen the whole extreme of that conversation on this show. So we’re going to first start with getting your opinion on this, but then we’re going to approach this all from a different perspective. We talked a lot about what’s the right intervals to get you ready for your event. You’re going to talk about it from get the physiological profile of the athlete, and then, based on that profile, pick what work is going to produce the best games for them. So with that, I’m going to throw it to you. I want you to jump into this debate that’s been ongoing for a couple of years. Does all interval work do basically the same thing? I love it. Great question. I could say we’re on a new frontier of intervals, and I’ll get to that in a little bit when we get later in the discussion and talking about how some intervals are being done and maybe even being done better, but to kind of answer your question, Where am I, or where are we? On the spectrum of all intervals are just work, and if you do the work, you get the adaptations versus highly specified. There’s a little bit of both, right? There is crossover, you know, I’m a big believer, if you’re doing Tabata intervals with high end work with short rest, that is going to be very similar to doing a steady state effort at or above threshold, right? But then with a little bit of rest, we tend to be able to get a higher neuromuscular adaptation, and that can make bigger advantages for some individuals who need it. I mean, I always feel like too is the intervals don’t necessarily need to be high end. They don’t need to be, you know, above threshold, VO two max or at threshold, intervals can be in Zone Two. Intervals can be race specific. You know, there’s going to be some engagement of all systems, but there’s going to be more engagement when the intervals are more. Specific, good way to express it, although the fact that you brought up that intervals can be zoned too. Yeah, I have an athlete I’m working with that. I’ve given him cadence intervals on his long rides. Brilliant. So he has on his computer this thing like, do six minutes at this cadence, and then four minutes of that. It makes it more interesting, and also just gives him some work. But you could see the mindset of when he sees the six minutes, yeah, even though it’s still zone two, he immediately goes up to threshold. Oh, really, yeah, exactly. He just goes out of the quick description of what the intent was, you bring up that those cadence intervals, we’re gonna get to that a little bit later too. I feel like some of the questions that you’ve run by me in the past, because there’s a need in someone’s physiological profile to work on cadence type situations, even at lower intensities. Yeah, so I think that’s worth bringing up, because whenever we think about intervals, and that’s kind of the example I was giving, my athlete goes, Oh, intervals. That means I go hard. Intervals don’t even necessarily mean you have to go hard. It can be other things that you are alternating that you are changing up. Yeah. Before we go any further, let’s hear from Dr Marco altini and his thoughts on how big an impact different interval types make. Interestingly, just like our conversation about Caden’s work, he went down a neuromuscular direction.
Dr. Marco Altini 06:16
Yeah, I would say that probably we overthink it the structure, the cloud structure. We have only data that looks at, let’s say, the response or oxygen trevorization, and then we extrapolate and speculate about the actual impact. But in when it comes to performance, I do not think there is strong evidence, then a certain workout is superior to another, and eventually that is what we care about. And even performance is so difficult to quantify in the long term, right? Studies last for 212, weeks, and we might look at what happens in that period of time, but that might not really relate to how we train in real life, with long term planning and building up over years any dose of the stimulus in different formats might lead to very similar outcomes. I would think one difference, maybe that can be relevant, is between runners and cyclists that at least I see in my experience here, the people I work with, sometimes as runners, that type of workout requires also to run fast with respect to how we normally run, right in a way that the load on muscles is different. So that might prepare us for specifically for a certain event, if we target a short distance. So even if we have long distance runners, and we want to run a 5k doing certain sessions, does not necessarily improve our wheel to max or makes us better from that point of view, but it might prepare our body to be able to sustain that speed that we otherwise might not be able to, and that might be slightly different right in cycling, where you do the session at a higher power, but from maybe muscle point of view, is not as different or as hard as you do it when you’re on art.
Trevor Connor 08:05
Let’s start with where you’re really comfortable. And like I said, this is going to be a different approach to this conversation, because often when we have the conversation about interval work, it’s, what type of event are you preparing for? What’s the best intervals for that? We’re going to take it from a different perspective of we’re going to do testing to look at your profile as an athlete, and then based on your profile, go, here’s the sort of work where you’re going to address your weaknesses and overall improve yourself as an athlete. So I wanted to start there. How do you test athletes? And let’s start in the lab. We did do a whole episode on the different types of testing, explaining them in detail, and I’ll put that in the show notes, but give us the one minute explain what a vo two max test is and what a lactate test is. So a vo two max test, by class in nature, is going to be shorter stages, right? Biking, running, hiking, you could do one minute stages. I’ve even seen it done with little tiny increments of 32nd stages or 15 seconds. But you’re ramping up really quickly to try to see how much oxygen the body can take in and use, and then effectively use to do the work. And once you get to your maximum effort, which is sometimes cued in with maximum heart rate. I’ll see it where vo two no longer rises, so we hit a max and it no longer increases. Then we know that athlete has hit vo two Max. Usually a test lasts between eight, maybe 1415, minutes, if I started them too easy, a lactate test. Is it the same test that I would use for a metabolic test? And those are longer stages where we really get a chance to see the physiological stress that an athlete is experiencing at a specific workload, right? We can tie it in with paces, with power, with heart rate. What you’re saying stages, you mean. You’re holding a steady wattage or running pace for five minutes, right? For a particularly the time we’re in the VO two max test, you’re saying it’s a minute before you increase the water really quickly rolling through it. Yeah, and you can get some of the same information. I don’t feel like VT one and VT two. You wouldn’t get lactate on a vo two max test, but VT one and v2 two can be moderately accurate. I feel like I do a much better job when looking at that data with a slower ramp protocol. And I’m tying it in, validating it with lactate. And part of the reason the stages are longer in a lactate test is because lactate is slow to respond. So if you want to, let’s say your stage, you’re doing 250 watts, and you want to see what your lactate is at 250 watts, you got to hold that for a while. And I know there’s been arguments with this. When Dr Sam Milan was running the lab, he’s like 10 Minute stages, yes, which was brutal. He was brutal. And it just made for
Jared Berg 10:59
people who would get a little bit less excited about coming in for the test, knowing that once they got past the easy stages, they were hanging out for 10 minutes. And then I almost felt like I got less out of the test because I missed some of the opportunity to ramp them up above threshold. Yep, and very quickly. So VT one and VT two. These are called your two thresholds. So VT one is that lower aerobic threshold? Yep, top of zone two. Right, right? So that would be the top of Zone Two. It’s the point where you start to see if you’re taking lactase. That’s when they start to kick up. And then the VT two is kind of equivalent to what people would call anaerobic threshold, or, yeah, yeah, your time trial power, Time Trial pace, yeah, FTP, sometimes, right? A whole bunch of different terms for it. I once looked up all the different terms. Oh, yeah, my gosh, you could use it. It was over 20. Yeah, we could do maximum steady state lactate, we could do sweet spot. We could do just, they go on and on, yeah, exactly. They’re all measured slightly differently. So they’re all going to give you a different results, but they’re all in that same area they are, yeah, so now that you’ve described to us how you do your testing, or describe to us the different types of tests, how do you use that data to start getting a profile of the athlete? What I’m able to do is see how proficient the athlete is at the endurance at their zone two, where the ventilation starts to show me some physiological inflections, right, some changes right, where their lactate starts to make a move from baseline. And then I’ll also see further along that RAM protocol, I’ll see another inflection point, and usually that’s right around the classic threshold, and that would be a lactate threshold. There’s also a very pronounced ventilatory threshold, and I can see significant changes in substrate utilization. So that’s what I’m all looking for. And then we should take that athlete above that threshold, stage, at least one stage, maybe even two or one and a half to two, and that usually brings them close to vo two max. And then I would make a vo two Max assessment. I am by no means saying that I can vo two Max somebody with a five minute ramp protocol, because that’s a little bit long for a vo two max test. However, I can make some really strong 98 99% accuracy predictions of where a vo two Max is. So then I’m able to take all that information and assess where someone’s strong. Are they really good above threshold, or are they more of an endurance athlete? Those are all the things that I’m looking at. I can look at things that we can talk about later, like gross efficiency on the bike. I can look at running economy, and I can also use those tests to assess where is someone’s LT one, VT one, lactate threshold one, ventilatory threshold one, in relation to vo two max or in relation to lactate threshold two or ventilatory threshold two, and then also, where is LT two, VT two in relation to vo two, Max. So those are all comparisons that I can make and use to understand sort of where somebody needs to make improvements based off of the laboratory testing that I got. Okay, thank you for giving that description of all this. So you said one of the big things that you look at is, where is VT one, where is VT two, where is VO two Max, and how they relate to one another. So I know very simply, if you look at a top pro endurance athlete, you really see that VT one and VT two come up where they’re going to hit their best vo two Max, very early in their career. So you see basically those other two numbers are getting much closer to their vo two, Max, yes, that’s certainly a trend that you’ll see, and that’s what you’ll be looking for. Is exactly that is. You’re kind of gaging that athlete’s experience their time training and lactate threshold two could be as high as 90, maybe even above maybe 93 94% Percent of vO two max that gives us an opportunity to look at, well, where is their potential. And so maybe that even that long term, well trained endurance athlete might need to put in a solid block of vO two Max training to raise the ceiling right? And so that’s an opportunity where maybe if we moved some of the other stuff that might interfere with quality at that high end, we might get even more out of that athlete raise the ceiling, give us more potential to move each one of those numbers a little bit higher, because realistically, we’re not going to get much higher than 95% vo two Max, that threshold, that would be really an area in saying, like, Wow, we got to fix vo two Max, yep. And I can give you an example of that. That’s one of the effects that you see with aging that I’ve seen, which is, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed my vo two Max has been coming down, yeah, but for the longest time, my LT to my threshold power kind of stayed the same. So you just saw them. I was getting to that 95% yes, yes, which meant I could still kind of chug along at a good pace, but I couldn’t jump, I couldn’t attack anymore. Yeah, you kind of were a one trick pony. Yeah, there’s a one pace pony. One pace pony. So, so there’s a question, though, with aging athletes like me, can you re raise that ceiling? According to, you know, the evidence, VO, two, Max, can be raised at any age. I think there’s always caveats, but thinking about, well, what are some of my limitations? Right? Is my vo two Max low because I no longer have the musculature needed to really drive it. Or have I not been doing, you know, five or 10 second sprints for five or 10 years? You know? What am I missing and just exploring that and then making a concerted effort to move that? Maybe it’s like, like we talked about earlier. Maybe it’s an opportunity to do high torque, lower cadence, build some serious strength on the bike, do that for a few weeks, three or four weeks, right at VO two Max ish efforts, and then come back and assess vo two Max after four or five weeks, you might see it jump when you combine it with strength and all the stuff. So I was gonna ask you that, how you can tell when you’re testing somebody to the lab, if you see them, where that LT two is 95% of vO two Max, how can you tell that you’ve just maxed out both versus no, you need to be raising that vo two Max. You’ve neglected that side. Are there ways that you can tell, I would say, to tell whether they’ve really maxed out both. I don’t feel like you could either tell or want to make an assumption. Instead, you want to leave room on the table, like we can potentially raise the VO two Max and give it an honest try, right? And so say this is the situation. This athlete does show a low aerobic ceiling. We want to raise that. And then, basically, the best way to tell would be to put an intervention in, you know, aka the intervals and the high end stuff, the high torque, build the on the bike specific strength or uphill running, get some plyometrics into the ankles and legs to build up running, you know, proficiency and economy, and then try to do work that builds vo two Max and then come back, yeah, like I would say realistic. You could come back six to eight weeks later, after a couple good blocks, and take a look, and you should see vo two Max move by even a couple points, you move vo two Max from, say, 58 to 60. That’s two points. That’s like three and a half, 4% increase. Yay. So before we dive deeper into what you look at in the lab, obviously, not everybody, not all of our listeners, have access to the labs. What sort of testing can they do at home? Awesome. So we’re talking about home. I say home is anywhere. Home is wherever the bike is, wherever the run is, right. We call that home. So one of the best ways to look at hero rides, races right times where you put out some of the best numbers that you’ve ever seen. What have you seen for your best five seconds, your best 30 seconds, one minute, two minute, 60 minutes, two hours, right? Those are all valuable data. Those are all great numbers that are always going to be there, and you can look at them and see how they trend over time. Same thing running, using races, is a great way with running, and a lot of like runners are distance runners. I’m a marathoner. I’m an ultra. Well, that’s just so far to one side of your running profile, right? I would suggest, if you have the health and the integrity and your soft tissue and your joints, to try a 400 race, an 800 there’s middle distance, there’s track races all around your community. Do the mile, see where your whole profile is. And if you feel like your 400 is not much faster than your 5k pace, that’s a concern. Say your five second sprint or 32nd all out, isn’t much stronger than your best five minutes, right? It’s only like 150 watts higher or 200 watts higher. Yeah, we need to move that up, right? And so those are the things that you’re looking at. That’s how you do it. But look at races you could also certainly do in the trainer. There’s ramp protocols that you could do in the trainer. There’s power Max testing. I could explain that that’s pretty fun and interesting. I’ve done that with athletes, you know, on the smart trainer treadmill, more power to you if you’re going to do testing in the house or at home on your treadmill. No, thank you for me. Just do races. Yeah? Well, Trevor will be tough because you got to set the pace on the treadmill. You can’t just run the pace you want to run. Yeah, it is, and it’s weird. It’s like, I’m gonna race a one mile effort on a Trevor when I could just hop at something fun outside with a big crowd of people. Yeah? I mean, that’s just a missed opportunity for fun. I feel like,
Trevor Connor 20:42
Yeah, but the bike gets a little more like, there’s numbers, there’s all these things. I feel like people can geek in and they say, what’s my watt per kg? I’m pushing out right now. And, yeah, so what do they look for when they go and get these numbers? Are they doing the same thing as you of trying to determine where that vo two max power is the LT one, the LT two. I know a lot of training software will come up with estimates of this based on those efforts, so you’re not going to be able to get those lab specific numbers or data points, but what you’re looking for is your best performance over the specific time that you’re looking so you’re looking for your best 30 seconds, your best one, two minutes, 60 minutes, right? And then what you want to do is start to look at and, hey, where are my strengths? Where does this look really good in comparison to my other numbers? And then also, there’s plenty of opportunities to compare, like there’s normative charts on where an All Arounder is, where a sprinter might lie, where a hill climber might be, as far as their data numbers or Time Trial list, right? And so you can start to compare against normative charts that have, that are out there and available in different training softwares and books and such. That would be one thing you want to do. But I think really a starting point is look for where your strengths are. And a lot of times where your strengths are is clues to where you need to work, right? So I would say their weaknesses no if you’re really strong on the above threshold, so a pretty good chance that your endurance needs some work, and that is going to be an area of building up your foundation so you can actually build your tower, your house, even higher. It’s something I would recommend to help with that. I know some of the training platforms do this. I use wkO, and there’s a chart in wkO that looks at your power duration curve. So what you’re talking about, it shows kind of your best, one second best, five second best, you know, all the way through whatever your longest ride is that has some value looking at just the shape of that curve, but it’s absolute values. You can get a chart that shows you relative to other people. Okay, now there’s actually a chart that I love that does you relative to your own age group, and what you’re looking for is where that changes. So for example, you look at mine, I’m a pure time trialist, yeah, when you get out to that 30 minute, 20 minute, one hour on a relative scale, I’m pretty good. You look at my one minute, and it basically says, yeah, a kid on a tricycle could beat you, yeah, yeah. So it shows you relative to other people, where you’re strong and weak. And again, I don’t look at that and cry and go, oh no. It’s telling me I’m bad here. It’s just saying, Here’s relatively where you’re strong, here’s relatively where you’re weak. And does tell me, yeah, that one minute effort, that’s something I really need to work on, which, you know, if you’re a time trials, like you’re saying, and your goal is time trialing, right, then you’re kind of like, you know what? I need to sort of accept and cultivate the strength of mine, work on a few different things here and there, with all in the intent of, actually, you know, improving my strength, right? However, if you’re a time trialist, but you’re no longer doing time trials, and you are doing gravel races of mid to long distance, but those gravel races have steep hills. They had their hot off the beginning. You want to get in that selection, you may need to at work on that one minute to five minute power that gets back to what are you training for? So you can certainly see my physiological weakness. Fast talk listeners during a recent listener survey, you told us you want to be able to listen to fast talk at work, on workouts and during housework. On YouTube, you talked. We listened. The fast talk podcast is now available on YouTube. We’ve added more than 100 of our best episodes with more releasing every day, and soon we’ll offer video summaries and other featured content that you won’t be able to hear on the audio only podcast. Search for fast talk labs on YouTube and be sure to subscribe. So let’s now talk about the different types of training and how from this testing, from the physiological profile, you can identify, yeah, this is something you need to work on. One and also, specifically, here’s some work that would really benefit you. So let’s start with endurance work. Gotcha. Zone two workers, even zone one work. What do you look for in an athlete? To say, You know what? You just need to be going out and doing those long rides and runs. They’re going to be where you’re going to see the biggest gains right now. So I’m looking at someone in the lab, or if I was going over someone’s data, like in an exercise science consult, which I do with individuals across the country, or with coaches, with athletes. So what you’ll do is, I’ll look at one is, where is lactate threshold one or VT threshold one in relation to vo two Max, or in relation to Lt two. So if that top of Zone Two, we can call it is like 65%
Jared Berg 25:48
of vO two Max. That’s too low. I want to see that up at 7072 73 getting up towards 75 that’s a little bit unrealistic, right? I do see that sometimes in athletes who are really, really endurance focused, who are going long steady state, I would say even actually now more amateur triathletes who are like elite level amateur triathletes, I will see very high zone two in reference to top zone two or LT one reference to vo Two, Max, and that’s because they’re not as ballistic as the pros are. Pro triathlon racing, and especially in the beginning of the bike, you have to have a very robust profile. But anyway, if someone’s down around 65% I’m like, Yeah, we need to work on our endurance. We need to work on what we can do at the top of our zone two. And how do we do that? We can do that with more time in zone two, maybe it’s 50, 60% of your training could be in zone two. That could be intervals, that could be straight, long blocks, that could be like three by 30 minutes in, you know, five beat range of the top of your zone two, or, you know, within five watts of the top of your zone two, right? That could be shorter intervals, like I work with one of the top junior cyclists in the country and the off road category, mountain bike, cyclocross, and I have him doing a lot of zone two intervals, where we go maybe eight to 10 minutes, where we’re pushing zone two, but we’re actually trying to sneak out a few extra watts, right? You know, say top of his zone two might be at 250 watts for this 140 pounder, which is a lot of watts. Yep, right? Maybe we’re getting 245 250 and the heart rate still hasn’t peaked out of zone two, which is pretty cool. And then we just take a little break, you know, two minute rest, and then we repeat, and we do that six to eight times. And next thing you know, we got some really good quality work, and that work is maybe moving a zone to a touch higher. Maybe it’s going from 67% now we’re getting towards 69 70%
Trevor Connor 27:55
of vO two, and that’s what I like to see. Yeah, one of the things I love to look at when you do a lactate profile of an athlete is actually that bottom part of the curve. So anybody who hasn’t seen this lactate curve, it starts kind of pretty much horizontal as you go through those stages. So the x axis of the chart is power, and then the y axis is your lactate. And so initially it’s going to stay horizontal, and then at certain point, lactates are going to start kicking up relative to power or pace, and you’ll get to a point where the lactates are too high. What you see in that elite athlete who has a really good aerobic base is it is just horizontal for a long time. They just go through stage after stage, or lactates aren’t moving at all. Or if you have that athlete who’s new and they’re not very well endurance trained, you’re gonna see the lactates starting to rise almost from the beginning. Yeah, that’s certainly it. And those really elite level athletes are really well endurance trained, their lactate will be lower than what yours and mine is sleeping. Yep. They’re just so so aerobic adaptated, where they can uptake so much lactate and use it as fuel, above and beyond what you know mere mortals can. So the other thing is, you can look at your at home data, right? If you’re seeing that you are really, really good at your five minute effort, and that looks like your cream of the crop, right? However, your best two hours is sitting really far down from that, say, like, for instance, what might that look like? Say, your five minute power is 380 watts, but your best two hour power is like 200 watts. That’s not ideal, right? We need to work on that zone too. We need to bring that 200 watts up to 230 to 40, and that’s not a big ask, and there’s potential there with proper training. Yep. So let’s dive into kind of one of my favorites. I do too much of this, especially now that I don’t have anything to train for and I just get to do what I enjoy. Well.
Jared Berg 30:00
Call it your jam. Yeah, this is my jam, lactate threshold training. So this is that training, somewhere around that VT two, and it could be anywhere from five minutes up to 15 minute intervals, even just going out and doing 2030, minute time trials, but just getting time at that LT two, right around that power pace. So what do you look for in the profile? To say, Yeah, this is the sort of work that this athlete should be doing, similar to how we did it with the endurance we’re looking at where this particular threshold is in relation to your max. All right, so if your lactate threshold is below 80% that is a big sign that you need to really work on your threshold work. And I will see some athletes around 75 78% and know that, hey, we need to put a little of the VO two Max work on hold. We can maybe do a little more zone one, a little bit less zone two, for a bit, right? And then we can really ramp up the amount of work that we’re doing at threshold, below threshold, slightly above threshold, with some rest, with intervals. Because our ultimate goal would be to, you know, this is looking at laboratory data, or, you know, lactate data is to get that lactate threshold closer to 90% that would what I would call sort of optimized. So that’s sort of what we’d want to do when we’re looking at at home data. It would be the same thing is look at where is your five minute power in relation to your best 60 minute power. I have a hard time saying, Where is your five minute power in relation to your 20 minute power? I don’t love that. And you had a question earlier where you’re wondering, Hey, what should athletes not look at? Yeah, right, get to that. And you said the 20 minute power. Yeah, I feel like 20 minute power is probably the worst one to look at by itself. It is a great number when you do all the calculations, when you understand your strengths and when you understand your weaknesses and such, and then you can make some best assumptions on what that 20 minute power means for you. There’s a amazing physiologist that we all know, Rob pickles. I feel like he’s had just some great thoughts about that. He’s like 20 minute power for somebody who’s really good at five minutes and one minute and has good anaerobic capacity that can be inflated, and that person is who’s trying to calculate their FTP needs to cut off another couple percent. Where somebody who is really good endurance, really good 60 minute power, good two hours, good zone two their 20 minute power is often maybe a couple percent higher. So maybe instead of like you know, for that anaerobically trained athlete where their 20 minute power is, maybe they should take 93 to 95% of that to calculate their FTP right, or their threshold power, the more aerobically trained individual who has good 6090 minute power and beyond, could maybe do 95 to 97% Yep. So one of the things I look at for there is, if I have somebody do a 20 minute test, I absolutely want to see the heart rate data, and that will tell you a lot, because when you have that anaerobically trained athlete, as you said, for 20 minutes, they can pull in a lot of anaerobic power to produce the good 20 minute but what you see is their heart rate never really levels off. It really just it starts low and ends very high. And you see a steep ramp over the 20 minutes where, when you have that pure aerobic animal, and you have the new 20 minutes, you’ll see the heart rate come up a little bit over the 20 minutes, but not as pronounced, but it’s pretty flat, and that’s sort of back into like, our main discussion is we’re using that athlete’s entire profile to make assumptions about a specific number, right? And so what we’re talking about today is like, how do you sort of take your athletic profile, whether you’re a runner or cyclist, and use that to assess it strength or weakness or a specific data point, yep. And I fully agree with you. Of you know, if you’re going and doing the testing at home, you need to learn these things about yourself. Because the other thing I see, you have somebody who’s much more anaerobically fit. You have them do the 20 minute. As you said, they can do a pretty good 20 minute, but then they go, keep going, do 30 minutes. Do 40 minutes, they start to fall apart. Yeah, I’m that aerobic animal. If I go out and do a 20 minute test, 30 minute test, a 40 minute test, they’re all gonna be almost exactly the same watch, which is crazy, but yeah, that speaks to your aerobicness for sure. Yeah. So, you know, ask yourself about that. You know you might crush the 20 minute, but go, could I have kept going at that pace? If your answer is, oh no, no, yeah, then you go, okay, that that might be over inflating if you’re like me, and you go, yeah, I could have kept going. Yeah. Couldn’t go harder, but I could have kept going. I love that you just brought in the subjectiveness to this, because there is a level of.
Trevor Connor 35:00
Subjective, we need to ask, what did we feel? What were we going through, right? And that could help us make some even better assumptions off of that data point, yep. So actually, give you a funny example of this. So we were doing super flag a few weeks ago and racing up it. And of course, they killed me, but it’s about a 30 minute climb, and I went, Yeah, I want to get my best 20 minute of the year. Okay, so I was hitting it hard, but I’m like, once I get to 20 minutes, I can ease off, yep. So I get to my 20 minutes, I do my best 20 minutes of the year, and I go, Okay, now I can ease off. And kept doing the same wattage for the next 10 minutes. Does it make a
Jared Berg 35:37
difference? Yes. Gosh, you know that’s different. I remember, like, I was on a road cycling team, and they gave me the assignment of, all right, Jared, we’re doing Lookout Mountain hill climb. We want you because we know you’re, like, not totally geared up for the full 20 minutes, but you can give us a good five. So lead us out, make it honest for the first five. And I went out, led the whole 40 person, you know, pro one, two peloton up the climb, and I’m just, you know, putting out, I don’t know, we’ll call it 400 ish watts, and then I get my five minutes. I’m done. I pop I still try to get up the climb, but it’s probably went from 400 watts to 200 watts. Yeah, I’m done. That is it. Would you have the athlete who’s more like me, where that LT two is very close to the VO two Max. Is there any value in doing that threshold type work? Or would you be taking an athlete like me and saying, You know what, you just need to be doing really high intensity stuff and try to raise that ceiling? I think the analogy is the ceiling analogy, right? So say we’re in a room and your foundation is getting bigger and bigger and getting so close to the ceiling, the ceiling is there, right? So in order to get anything any higher, we actually need to raise the roof. And so that would be the answer to that specific situation, right? If you feel like you’re getting too close, and we are getting 92 93%
Trevor Connor 36:59
of vO two max for your threshold. We need to save some of the energy you’re spending on threshold, right, bank it and then use it to do vo two Max work, right? And there’s vo two Max work can come in all fun and sexy shapes and forms. You can make it as interesting or as simple as you want and start, you know, raising the roof. So with somebody like me, would the strategy be, in the base season, probably do a little more high intensity, see if you can get that ceiling up once you’ve raised that then actually, in the season, maybe bring back some threshold work. Would that be your approach? Eloquently stated exactly because you’re trying to, you’re like your understanding your long term nature is to have a good threshold, right? However, your season, which is this time trial races, ask you to have a better threshold, right? So you’re going to take, at a certain point, a little bit further from the race series to raise your ceiling. That way, when you start to work and really improve your threshold, maybe it’s come up, maybe it’s gonna come up a percent absolute right in relation to vo two Max. Hopefully it’s still not getting above like 92 93% because your VO two Max is now a couple points higher. So would it be the opposite approach with somebody who has that decent vo two Max, but the LT one and Lt two are both low percentages. Would you just be saying, We got to take advantage of the base and do a whole lot of aerobic work with you. Try to get those LT one and Lt two percentages up exactly when it’s too far from it. There’s opportunity, right? And so if you got to manipulate intervals that allow you to get more quality work done at threshold, we want to get zone two up a little bit. So we need to manipulate the training around that to give you more volume. You know, to get zone two up, maybe it’s like you’re shifting the amount of volume you’re doing in Zone One to be more zone two heavy. And that’s okay, because you’re not doing all that high end energy depleting work, and you’re sort of banking some. So what I love about this. You know, there’s always that conversation of, what sort of work should you be doing in the base season? Here, we’re basically saying, let’s get the profile of the athlete, see what their strengths or weaknesses are, and then the base season is going to be very different, depending on where they can really see the benefits, which I love. So it’s very individual, super fun. So let’s jump up to that next type of work. We already answered that question a little bit, but that anaerobic capacity, VO two, Max type work so that you’re above threshold, this is where you’re doing your tabatas. This is where, for anybody who really wants to suffer, you’re doing those extremely hard five minute intervals, or two minute intervals, or 3030s, kind of a broad range here. Yeah. What are you looking for the profile to say this is the sort of work you should be doing right now. Yeah, this is back to you. We’re looking for that profile where your maximum efforts are not that convincing compared to your steady state threshold efforts or your endurance An example might be somebody who is go to cycling here, someone.
Jared Berg 40:00
Is putting out their maximum 32nd efforts, like, say, 700 watts. Seven Watts is quite a bit of watts for some people. But if their lactate threshold is 320, watts, that’s not that convincing, right? We really would want to see, like summer build to hold 30 seconds, you know, closer to 1000 Right? Or in their max sprint, you know, even be up, you know, 11, 1200 it’s not crazy high, but it’s high. And so if that’s not there, then there’s an opportunity to sort of work on those high ends, right? Or a V like, again, like a vo two Max is, you know, 400 watts, but threshold is like 310, VO two Max has room to go up. Yep, right. And so that’s how you do it, and that’s how you look at it, and that’s what you work on it good. I started by saying there’s a lot of different types of work. So when we talk about this, there is that steadier, two to five minute effort. There’s also that very short, like 3030s, 2010s, at that point are you saying, pick the one that you like the most, or do you see differences, or the things that you look at in the profile to go, No, you should be doing more tabatas versus you should be doing more that two to five minute effort, I would say the former. When you start doing the tabatas type stuff that comes back into a threshold type effort a lot of times. If these sets get too long, yeah, if you keep them shorter, like if you did four by 30 on 30 off, and you’re able to get some really great numbers. That takes you on the four minutes, and then you take another break, like a two or three minute break, maybe longer, and then you repeat that two more times. That would be kind of similar type stress as doing, say, four by three minutes, because you got some really good high end. You’re never really quite recovered. And maybe you really gravitate towards that kind of set, and that feels fun and exciting. The one thing no one seems to disagree with me is a straight steady state, three, four minutes at VO, two, Max, blows. Oh, it’s not fun. I mean, no, thank you, right? And so you’ll see this Norwegian method, like, hey, the best way to raise vo two Max is do four by four minutes at VO two Max. No, I mean, that’s who’s gonna do that for more than two or three weeks and not say this sucks, right? Right? They’re all gonna be like, now I don’t do vo two max. So instead, you need to make something that is attainable realistic, right? And, you know, moderately enjoyable. When you get done, you’d be like, oh, yeah, I got some work done. And I kind of want to try that again, right? Where you just do too long, too hard of intervals, you’re going to get two or three weeks max. And the only reason that they’re able to get that data is because they had the people signed up for the study, is my guess. You know, they just had to do it. So pick vo two max if you love doing one minute efforts up your favorite hill climb. Do that hill climb? Do eight of them, right? That’s a great vo two Max session, right? And does it need to be totally at VO two Max? You can get vO two Max stimulus if you’re a couple percent from vo two max. So I mean, couple percent, say, if you’re like 5% from vo two Max, your VO two Max is at 400 you could be doing just fine at 380 you don’t need to be pinning 400 all the time, right? And so that’s something to think about too. So it’s you want to be realistic and attainable and moderately enjoyable? Yeah? No, you bring a really good point. You see this in some of the early research when they were looking at tabatas and shorter intervals, like 3030s, yeah, because at the time, it was more traditional for athletes to go out and do those longer, four by fours or four by fives, which, as you said, were miserable. And I remember reading some of those earlier studies. I’m saying tabatas, like 2010s seem to produce about the same gains as those vo to max intervals the four by fours, yeah, but way more enjoyable, yeah? Like the athletes could actually get through this. Because, as you said, the four by fours are just miserable to do, yeah? So that was a lot of the original impetus behind those shorter intervals. Of you get the same benefits, but I think you brought up a really good point, of you want to do them with quality, so it’s not necessarily about doing more. And I had that experience. I love 15, fifteens, and I remember I used to do 12 in a set, so that works out to six minutes, and I bumped it up to 16 in the set. Yeah, it wasn’t as good. Yeah, you get to 16 and now you’re getting six or seven minutes. You’re getting above, sort of, you’re overreaching, yeah, VO, two Max now, and you’re getting towards, sort of like above threshold. Yeah, what I would see is you’d get through the first one go, oh my god, I got 15 left, and you just wouldn’t do them as hard. Yeah? You pace yourself now where, if you’re doing 10 or 12, yeah, I’m gonna hit everyone hard, yeah, and that’s what you’re trying to get. I just say, if you can get four up to maybe 12 minutes to work in vo two max is the quality vo two Max workout. You’re not trying to go out and do like 20 or 30 minutes of vO two Max work. You. In a session, four minutes. Four by one minutes is a good quality. VO, two Max session. We’ll give you adaptation. We’ll move the needle. 12 minutes is about as long. So like for you, you might do two times of those rotations. Could be your max, or just one would be great. So for somebody at home who can’t get into the lab, what should they be looking for to say, Yeah, this is the work I should be doing right now. So I mean, that goes back to looking at the numbers, right? And you’re like, if you’re seeing your five minute vo two Max is not quite high enough in relation to your threshold power, or your zone two power, then you need to work on that. So you just look at the numbers. You’re like, where my FTP is compared to my best five minute power, and ask yourself, how good are those numbers if they’re not put yourself in a situation where you can really test yourself again, go and do a hero ride with that crazy group that you join on Wednesday mornings, or hop in a race, and you’re going to see some numbers if everything’s geared up right, and then make the assumptions based off of what you find. So I get to throw one out, and I’d love to get your response of this. I love to look at how athletes perform in those first couple races in the season, and it’s a subtle difference. But if you have an athlete who they go into a race and go, Yeah, most of the time I was sitting in the field. It was relatively easy. I was not in any sort of danger. But then we got to the point in the race where people were attacking and I just couldn’t quite close the gap. That’s where I go. You need this high end work. You need to build that one minute power. You need to build that jump. But that’s different from an athlete who says, Yeah, I went to the race. I was sitting in the field, I was struggling a bit the whole time I was close to threshold, and then when people attacked, I just couldn’t cover the moves. Yes, that tells me the aerobic engine isn’t there. Yes, doesn’t matter that much. If you do the one minute work, you’re just not fit enough to really be competitive in that race? Yeah, and that’s a dialog to have with your coach, and that’s a constant one that you’re working on with athletes, and I’m working on with coaches, because one of my main ways I work is I consult with coaches like, Hey, Jared, I have this athlete that’s experiencing this, how do you suggest we address it? And that is a high level response that you just gave where it’s like, hey, if we have them, if I listen to the athlete having them tell me what they were experiencing, where they’re like, Yeah, this felt good. I was on it. But then when they went, I didn’t have it. You’re like, Well, where do you think we’re missing in your training? I love asking the athlete back this. Coaches always feel like I have to tell the athlete, no, you have to engage with the athlete. And when an athlete says, You know what, I feel like I really need some vo two Max efforts, or I need some good one minutes, or that high torque stuff that we did near vo two Max really helped me last year. At this point, I feel like I’m missing it now, right? And those are the times to bring in that work. And now you have both buy in engagement on both sides, and then in your athlete, you know, like, who’s wants to hit the next race and be closer to having that problem solved, you know, that question answered, and be able to go with those attacks. That’s the perfect world. Okay, next type of work is sprint work. What do you look for in the profile to say this athlete needs to go out and do some good 510, second sprints? So just real simplistically, they have poor sprint numbers, right? They get to the end of the race and they’re with a group of pack of, like, 30, and they finish 28th right? It’s like, that’s no fun. Or they’re in a, you know, cross country running race, right? Or end of a 10k and they, you know, like, maybe, unless there’s checkpoints wherever they were in, like, you know, 30th place and then, like, eight people went by and had no kick, right? That’s a good indication we need to work on Sprint. Not able to cover tax, right? That’s a good sprint option, you know, not getting sprint premiums in a crit race, right? Those are all good reasons. The other one that’s a little bit more complex is looking at gross efficiency. You know, gross efficiency, I guess, easily explained, is our body can create so much energy. This is not the way of saying it, but it can create power, right? Unfortunately, not all that power goes to pedaling the bike. And so if someone is pedaling at you know, it’s creating 1000 joules per second of energy. We could also call that 1000 watts. The 1000 watts is not going in because they could be doing that in the top of zone two, right, or in tempo zone, they could be creating 1000 watts, but they’re not moving at 1000 watts. If they were, they’d be winning the Tour de France, right? However, a lot, by a lot, they would have dropped. So the issue is that they’re only pedaling at maybe 210 watts when they are producing 1000 joules per second, or 1000 watts. That means that the gross efficiency is 21 Percent, right? 21% is okay, right? I would say okay. Is anywhere from 20 and a half percent to maybe 22% exceptional is 22 to 24 some people maybe are above 24 I haven’t quite seen a lot of that. Tauta, so that’s gross efficiency is how much power do you get to the pedals from the amount of energy that you’re producing. Well, if somebody has something in the low 20s, high teens, that tells me that is an opportunity to work on how well you can push the pedals. I would love to say it matters how smooth of a pedal you are, how much circles you spin, your cadence and such. It really doesn’t. It really matters. From the most common, most recent research, everything we’re understanding, it’s really how well you can push down into those pedals. So you need to get stronger. You need to pedal in, like we talked about very earlier in discussion, Cadence drills, low cadence, high torque, right? Those are opportunities that can help improve gross efficiency. Sprinting. How well can you get your body to leverage in and push into those pedals that has the best opportunity to improve gross efficiency? So that’s one of the reasons why these tour riders have amazing gross efficiency, because they are doing all sorts of tricks and things on their bike, whether they’re in races or they’re in training, to just challenge the way they interact with their pedals and cranks. Yeah, I think that is one of the biggest opportunities that a lot of athletes miss out on, something that we could test in a lab. I can’t tell you often I go bike rides and I watch the way somebody’s riding a bike, and just go. You don’t need to go do intensity. You just work on that neuromuscular firing pattern. Yeah, you gain 3040, watts. Yeah, exactly. Someone who’s like spinning super, super high, but you know, they’re not quite pushing the pedals. We need to fix that. Yep, to that point, I’ll switch it around. I’ve joked a lot in the show about how I’m a really bad runner. When I do actually want to get my running fast, I do sprint work, yes, because so much of my slow running is the firing pattern, is the efficiency. And I’ve noticed I spent a couple of weeks where, if I’m on my runs, I do 510, second sprints, brilliant. Then all of a sudden my steady pace is a minute faster. Yeah, yeah. And that fun, yeah. And that’s sort of recognizing, you know, as we get older, or you spent your life on a bike, we’re missing some of that elasticity, that plyometric action and strength or power in our foot strike. And the two best ways I feel like to improve economy is strides, like you’re mentioning, or sprints. And also, within reason, volume is the more time you spend doing a sport, yes, the more we improve our efficiency. We improve our economy. And then I say within reason, yeah, if you’re, you know, a 60 year old runner, lifer marathon or unfortunately, by running more, you’re probably not going to get much out of it by doing more of a Trevor. But you’re saying by doing the sprints and the speed and some Plyometrics, some strength training, that’s going to be the way that you’re going to enhance your running economy and turn back the sort of biological running clock makes a big difference. Yes. So yeah, I love that. You. You bring all that up because in some ways, you’re looking for something very different to say, I need the sprint work. Yeah, yeah. So is there ways of testing that at home? Obviously, efficiency is easy to test in a lab. I’m gonna say no. I’ll say no, well, damn it. Sorry. I don’t know, folks, I don’t know how you would ever get like I have equations based off of the ventilatory data that give me total energy being produced by the body. And then it’s like, that math is simply divide that by the amount of watts you have at that specific workload, and that is your growth efficiency. Yep, fortunate. That was my answer too. I was hoping you’d have a better one. Yeah. I’m like, No,
Trevor Connor 53:56
I can’t think of a way. The best I can give you is from having been tested, there is a feel, yeah, with the efficiency isn’t there? When the neuromuscular firing patterns aren’t there, you kind of feel like a tank, yeah, when it’s there, you feel a little more like you gotta jump, like you got a extra kick in your Yeah, or, what if maybe, like you you’re pedaling hard on the bike, but you’re noticing that you’re like, you’re moving around and your hips are sliding out, or your knee is playing, or those kind of things. You’re like, you’re just, you’re kind of putty, right? Versus when everything’s operating like a smooth piston, just, you know that you’re on it, yeah, you can certainly have somebody watch you. And if you’re bouncing all over the bike, there’s issues there, yeah, yeah, you watch a pro on the bike and they don’t budge. Yeah, pretty cool to watch.
Suzy Sanchez 54:44
Hey listeners. I’m Susie Sanchez from USA Cycling. If you like what you hear on fast talk podcast, you’re the kind of coach we want as part of our certified coach program, fast talk Labs is producing 50 courses on physiology, training, athlete management and the business of coaching, all for you. Cycling coaches, visit USC, cycling.org backslash coaches to learn more.
Jared Berg 55:06
So few other things we mentioned. Not all interval work is about intensity. We mentioned cadence interval work. When do you prescribe that? What do you look for? Cadence? Interval work I’m going to be doing when I see something as a limiter. So if gross efficiency is a limiter, great opportunity to work on high torque drills. Right when somebody is comes back and their three hour power or a ride profile, like if I said, You know what, let’s just ride three hours steady. And it’s like three hours, steadily decreasing. And then I look at their cadence, and their cadence is like, maybe 75 to 80, right? It was just low, not crazy low, but it’s low, it’s low, right? But then I see that tied with a power decline. I’m like, they’re trying to pedal a bike, like they’re in the gym strength training, right? And with strength training, we use our type two muscle fibers. So they’re trying to pedal a bike mostly with their type two muscle fibers. And so those fibers just don’t have the endurance to go the long haul. And if you’re a triathlete, there’s a coach I think that works a lot of European and Swiss athletes who’s always like having his athletes pedal at super low cadences. I had this conversation with one of my athletes that works with the coach who I work with, and I’m like, Well, you see these athletes, they do some pretty good bike outputs because their economy actually goes up with this lower cadence, yes, and we do see that right? However, their muscular endurance slides with these low cadence because they’re trying to use type two muscle fibers, so therefore, they often will get off the bike, and you won’t see them be able to hold on to whatever lead that they had, and they will get run down. They’ll get run down in Iron Man, Hawaii, we’ve seen it multiple times. And then we see just in this last PTO 100 like someone was like, just really slow cadence, just mash, mash, mash. Well, that was a t1 100 in France. That’s when I was watching, and sure enough, she went from first to 10th, and it’s like you don’t have that endurance in those muscular fibers that you’re asking even though your economy is amazing. Which I get it. I love that. We have great gross efficiency, but doesn’t matter if you don’t have the endurance to hold it for the effort, and then maybe for those athletes run off the bike. Yep, I have a workout for my athletes for the long ride. That’s, as I was saying, All cadence work. Yeah, you do a warm up, and then it’s 30 minutes of high cadence, where I have some alternating it’s six by four minutes three times. Then you do 30 minutes of low cadence, another 30 minutes of that high cadence sequence, and the low cadence, and then one more the high cadence. Yeah, and I can tell you, this has been my experience. Of my athletes experience those low cadence 30 minutes feel like the breaks. They’ll often actually put out higher wattage, yeah, but it’s still easier. And as you said, as you get to that third high cadence, yeah, 30 minutes, it is tough. Yeah, it’s interesting with that low cadence, not doing long enough to get that fatigue. So it brings your heart rate down. Yes, it brings your VO two uptake down. It’s raising your gross efficiency and your economy. So all those things feel really good, and then you’re just doing them for like, I don’t know, 30 minute pieces here, but you go and do the higher cadence work, you’re asking for more heart rate, your breath, rate increases, all those sensations that give you the feeling of like, Oh, I’m over exerting myself a little bit here. However, your muscles actually invite it, and they are great with it. They’re basically dispersing the load over more revolutions, right? It just feels a little bit harder cardiovascular Yep, no, you got it spot on, all right. So we talked about how to pick what you should be doing. Let’s talk about when you see an athlete doing something that they shouldn’t be doing. Good example would be just generally high baseline lactates from the first lactate through when lactate finally arises off baseline, or if lactate is constantly sloping up from where go, there’s a good sign that they’re always working in that sort of gray zone, like above zone two, or always that threshold, or sub threshold, and then doing intervals. It’s common, like very common thing for me to get exercisers who are going to the gym and doing their exercising and just trying to get good cardio right, versus truly training. I also see poor fat metabolism lower in dropping fat metabolism from word go means that they’re not quite hitting the right lower intensities. I will, you know, in the same idea as somebody who just can’t get, you know, lactate above four millimoles, right? I will often, you know, I will see that maybe it’s only five millimoles. I will ask two questions. There, are you not doing the right work in your training, or are you not feeling yourself appropriately with adequate carbohydrate, right? And both of them are served. It can be equally impactful. Yeah. So when you are prescribing the work, how do you prescribe it? Do you use zones? To use power heart rate pace. What do you give an athlete? So the most classic way I’ll describe it, or prescribe zones, would be to give heart rate zones through anything sub threshold, any longer intervals, sub threshold or longer. Zone two efforts, even shorter. Zone two efforts, a short. Zone two effort might be like, eight minutes. I will give power zones for anything threshold and above, you know, I would recommend a coach give an athlete power zones if that’s what they really like doing. We want to make sure it’s engaging. But if they’re like, you know, I like to just key in on my heart rate. Heart rate could be the great way to do it. However, we all know heart rate has a way of lagging behind when we’re doing short intervals and sort of anything threshold and above. So we have to be smart about our pacing not to overshoot the effort. Feel is a great way let’s do that sort of sub threshold tempo feel that you know you could hold for 60 minutes if you were in a race, and just, you just want to jam on that and get that climbing rhythm going. That’s a great way to describe a steady state. Sub threshold, sweet spot, effort, the next frontier in interval training. It’s not that it’s new, it’s that it’s being done more and it’s being done with more effectiveness, and that is using lactate to help control the intervals. For instance, I had my son do in the morning. It was he had maybe five by one miles at threshold pace. We checked his lactate. His lactate was 2.7 after the first one running a 518 pace. The next one, he did 515 it got to 3.5 I’m like that is approaching on a little bit too fast for our sub threshold effort. Let’s back it off. He backed it off to like 520 his lactate came back down to 2.5 and then this last couple right around there, right that’s how we use lactate. The same we did the same thing in first double in the evening, where he did 20 by four hundreds, around 72 seconds per 400 we kind of played around with a second or two in there. We made sure his lactate was low enough. In the beginning, we saw lactates around two millimoles, 2.2 millimoles after the first block of five. We brought the pace up a little bit. We got it up to like 3.2 after the third block of five. And then we said, You know what 3.2 is just about right for these, you know, four hundreds. And let’s hold it here. Bring it here. Bring it maybe a half a second faster. Admittedly, we jump through zones pretty quickly, so let’s have Dr Steven Seiler give a more nuanced description of how to use zones once you have your physiological data.
Dr. Stephen Seiler 1:02:34
I think there is value in zones as just a starting point for a conversation and for better communication with the coach. But then we have to layer on top of that baseline understanding and kind of terminology that we have in common. We have to understand that as soon as I go out there and start that session, or that five hour ride, or that four times eight minute interval session, my body is changing so that particular intensity that was zone three is drifting. It may end up as zone four. And that’s what makes zones potentially less useful, is it’s a dynamic sliding scale. So those zone markers are moving on while we’re training, but they’re unfortunately not moving in the right direction. They’re generally moving in the wrong direction. So that you know, zone two becomes zone three, or zone three becomes zone four during the training session. And we just have to be very cognizant of that. In your research, you refer a lot to a three zone model, but often when you’re talking about us, you talk about a five zone model if you were going to use one for training. Which would you use? It depends. The three zone model is, and I write about this. It is physiologically anchored at three points, you know, LT one, LT two, and VO two, Max. So it gives us an anchoring and then a five zone model can layer on top of it, because it lines up with those points, you know. So in a five zone model, the Green Zone gets a green and a dark green, and the yellow zone is still the yellow zone. It’s the same threshold. And then the red zone gets an orange and a red, you know. So it gets split up into shades of red and shades of green. And so then you say, well, then those are just fuzzy lines that you’re making up. And then I say, yep, that’s exactly right. They are totally arbitrary. And then the reason they’re there is that maybe they give some nuance to the communication between coach and athlete. That’s their value. Is if the athlete has become sensitive enough to their training where I’m trying to impress on them, on that, that hard interval session, hey, I want you to get to work, but I don’t want you to go too into the cellar, then I’m going to call it zone four, not so you know what I mean. That makes it a little more defined what I’m asking them. Do, and so that’s the value of more zones. But if I’m working with a junior, if I’m working with a young athlete, I’m going to be very happy if I can teach them how to understand three zones. I’m going to say, hey, let’s really understand what Green Zone means and how it feels, you know, and then we’ll move from there. If they really demonstrate to me that they have mastered the three zone model, you know, then I’ll let them add to the color palette and throw orange in there and throw dark green in there. So then it’s a pedagogical tool. I have noticed with some very new athletes that I’ve worked with that it ultimately ends up being a whole bunch of shades of yellow. Yeah, right. So if we can get them past that and bring some green into the color palette and bring some then that is great progress. So let’s be happy with three zones. You know, I think for most age groupers, people like me, three zones works fine.
Trevor Connor 1:05:57
The last question I want to hit you with today you had started by saying that there’s some exciting stuff, kind of changes, revolutions and interval work. Can you tell us a little bit about what’s going on? What are these big changes? So we’re looking at trying to make intervals, not just about how much work you can do, but how much does that work affect you? Right, right? We’re looking at people who are doing intervals, and we might have runners who are doing two to four threshold workouts in a week. Yeah, they’re training 90 to 100 miles, so there’s room in there. You know, they’re 8020 if we were to go with that classic model. So they have room for this threshold. But if we let the threshold like a runaway train, it’s going to get a way of everything else, in the way of recovery. It’s going to get in the way of muscle and joint integrity during those runs, we could lead to injury. How do we feel right to recover? However, if, just like I talked about a little bit before, if we use the smartest possible pace, dial things in as best as we can, like I was doing with lactate with my son, what are the opportunities there is that next workout going to be that much better? Is going to be able to perform? Are we going to get a couple more seconds or two, a couple more reps without too much stress, and therefore be able to keep progressing and building him through his season so he’s right at the right spot when we need him there? That’s the next frontier, right? We can do that with lactate. We can do that with potentially some, you know, portable vo two meters. There’s certainly some other ways. We always talk about, hey, if we can do a continuous glucose monitor, why can’t we do continuous lactate monitor? I think there’s a clear reason for that. I don’t think we’re going to get there, and that’s because lactate, it’s interstitial fluid, and takes too long to register. Yeah, it’s giving 30 minutes exactly. But anyway, that’s where I am with the frontier, it’s using really precise physiological data points in everyday training. Well, Jared, always very enlightening when we have you on the show. Always love your insights on this. You bring the lab into the room. So appreciate having you on the show. We’ll have you on again, I’m sure, very soon, but thanks for the conversation. And so I think with that, we’ll finish out, you know how this works. We got one minute to give your thoughts on what is the most valuable thing to take from this. And I’ll give you a second to think about it. I will give my one minute. There was something that caught my attention right at the end of the conversation there, where you talked about looking at that lactate profile and be able to see, yeah, you need to be doing more zone two. You’re doing too much high intensity. Because we recently had an episode where we talked about this new paper on zone two training and whether it’s actually beneficial or not. And there was this huge dive into the biochemistry of it, which I love. But what we didn’t even discuss on that episode that you really brought today is what you see in the lab, what you can see with testing, where you can look at that lactate profile and go, your lactates are really high and they’re kicking up early. You’re not doing enough base work that wasn’t even mentioned the paper wasn’t even mentioned when we address the paper, yeah. But for somebody who’s in a lab like you, and looking at this every day, it’s so obvious, oh yeah. So you go, what’s the benefit of zone two? You can go, here’s a lactate profile before somebody did zone two work. Oh yeah, here’s a lactate profile after, and you can see the difference. This is the benefit of the testing. And like I said, I know most of our listeners don’t have access to a lab, and there’s ways you can see these things at home, but there is a ton that you can see by doing this testing that can help you determine this is the sort of work that I should be doing. And I think that’s the valuable lesson here. Yeah, I love before and after tests. There’s so much fun, especially when everything works out, right? Yep, love it, yeah. So, I mean, just back into the actual what this discussion was about, it’s really take some time to, you know, analyze your own data and look at what your profile is and be like, Hey, where are my strengths? What can how can I look at those strengths and determine my best area to work and develop? Right? And this is not just about race.
Jared Berg 1:10:00
Performance and such. This is about health, right? When you can actually understand who you are, you know how you respond to to work, exercise, and you start to make some significant changes, you can really increase your physiological potential. So, yeah, take a dive in. Look at where your zone two is, your best two hour effort is relation to your best five minute hour five minute effort. Have fun with it. Talk about it with your coach. Open that dialog. It needs to be back and forth. Come in for a test to validate what you’ve already know about yourself, or learn more you know things so but yeah, there’s the opportunities there, and have fun making the changes to make it happen. Fantastic. Well, let’s leave it there. Thanks again. Always a pleasure having you join us. Thanks for having me. That was another episode of fast talk. The thoughts and opinions expressed in fast talk are those of the individual subscribe to fast talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcasts. Don’t forget, we’re now on YouTube. As always, be sure to leave us a radian review. To learn more about this episode, from show notes to References, visit us@fasttalklabs.com
Trevor Connor 1:11:10
and to join the conversation on our forums. Go to forums.fasttalklabs.com for Jared Berg, Dr Marco altini and Dr Steven Seiler. I’m Trevor Connor. Thanks for listening. You.
